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The title is a bogus Rama Krishna epigraph, Buddha's circle where destinies converge, it is the red light ran at night and the chalk mark on a cue stick. The plan is a Place Vendôme robbery pitched by a prison guard to the parolee (Alain Delon) the night before he's released, "sans risques." His partner is the prisoner (Gian Maria Volonté) who leaps out of a moving train and into a Cézanne forest, the two meet in a muddy field and exchange cigarettes and glances, the fugitive climbs into the trunk and they drive to Paris. "La différence qui sépare un dilettante d'un professionnel." A marksman is needed, the ex-policeman (Yves Montand) is first seen sweating from the DTs, besieged by hallucinatory critters. On their trail is a ploddingly implacable inspector (André Bourvil) who goes home to well-fed felines and defers to his wizened chief on the subject of mankind's guilt. "They're born innocent, but it doesn't last." Jean-Pierre Melville's penultimate refinement of the underworld ethos, the geometry of men and traps and the fateful circuit that can be broken only by death. (The camera takes an overhead view of a snooker table, suddenly the drifting orbs suggest Godard's cosmic coffee cup in 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her.) A masculine menagerie of fences, stool pigeons and torpedoes, the female of the species is a perfidious girlfriend's photograph in the wastebasket and a row of glazed nightclub chorines in revolving costumes. "You've got your psychology all wrong." The heist uses masks from Karlson's Kansas City Confidential, the director's fabled meticulousness is indicated as the recovering rummy painstakingly calibrates a shot before simply taking the rifle off the tripod and firing a bullet into the security system's peeper. (Montand's resemblance to Bogart was never more pronounced.) Mann brings it all back home for Heat. Cinematography by Henri Decaë. With Paul Crauchet, Paul Amiot, Pierre Collet, André Ekyan, and François Périer.
--- Fernando F. Croce |